Elmart 24 f2.8 flare on M8

[tofsla]

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My new Elmarit 24 ASPH shows very ugly flare on my M8. I read everywhere that lens is flare free. Do I have bad copy and need to send it back to Leica? I am using hood and no filters! Please help. Thanks

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[cam2000]

When shooting in the sunlight direction extra care should be used to shield the lens specially now that we have a filter (IR) on the lens..... I use my hand above the lens making sure that it does not enter in the field of the picture.

[stunsworth]

No lens is flare free, although the Noctilux comes closest in my experience.

 

The greatest risk of flare is from the sun being just outside the edge of the frame - which seems to be the case here. As Jacques mentioned it can be useful to use your hand to shade the lens in those situations.

[lars_bergquist]

What you have is not flare. Flare is stray light which spreads across most of or the whole image like a fog of light, severely degrading contrast. What you have is internal reflections. You will notice hat the most prominent reflection has the shape of the aperture, limited by the iris diaphragm blades. Light has then bounced from several other internal surfaces, giving rise to secondary reflections.

—No coating can completely abolish such reflections, only reduce them. The situation when you took this picture is such that most other lenses would have shown stronger reflections than this.

—As for flare and other forms of vagrant light, it is however a fact that not only the 28mm Elmarit but all other Leica M 28mm lenses since at least 1979 have been remarkably free of this. As with reflections, there is however always a limit which must not be overstepped. Your Elmarit is in fact behaving in an exemplary way.

 

The old man from B.C. (Before Coating)

[marknorton]

Important to keep in mind too that the lens has a wider angle of view than the picture suggests because of the M8 crop factor.

 

If you had been shooting FF, the sun would have been in the picture and our response would have been "What do you expect, the sun is in the frame!". Just because the sun is not in the frame doesn't mean the lens is not seeing it and having to handle it. I think the reflections are quite well controlled, actually.

[wattsy]

As someone who often shoots in the direction of the sun, my experience of the 24 Elmarit is that it is not particularly resistant to the kind of flare 'blobs' (internal reflections) displayed in your picture - in fact, I'd say it is rather susceptible to the effect. However, as a consolation, the 24 (like most modern Leica lenses) is remarkably resistant to veiling glare (a general loss of contrast) which can look worse. Like some of the other posters have pointed out, you have to be prepared to shield the lens with your hand (or something like a piece of card) when you have a strong lightsource in or near the frame. At least with the M8 you can chimp and reshoot if necessary (assuming that the shot is repeatable).

[leicashot]

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What you have is not flare. Flare is stray light which spreads across most of or the whole image like a fog of light, severely degrading contrast. What you have is internal reflections. You will notice hat the most prominent reflection has the shape of the aperture, limited by the iris diaphragm blades. Light has then bounced from several other internal surfaces, giving rise to secondary reflections.

—No coating can completely abolish such reflections, only reduce them. The situation when you took this picture is such that most other lenses would have shown stronger reflections than this.

—As for flare and other forms of vagrant light, it is however a fact that not only the 28mm Elmarit but all other Leica M 28mm lenses since at least 1979 have been remarkably free of this. As with reflections, there is however always a limit which must not be overstepped. Your Elmarit is in fact behaving in an exemplary way.

 

The old man from B.C. (Before Coating)

 

The internal reflection is caused by FLARE. There is no other way to explain it. How else is an internal reflection caused?

 

There is nothing wrong with the lens...flare will creep in from time to time and there are many factors. Infact putting the sun in the image would probably reduce the severity of flare.

[vanhulsenbeek]

My new Elmarit 24 ASPH shows very ugly flare on my M8.

 

This remarkably looks like the blobs - not flare - I get with the WATE and which I am sure are caused by the UV/IR filter.

I have not been able to get it in pictures without filter.

 

See at the very right of the picture in:

 

http://www.l-camera-forum.com/leica-forum/landscape-travel/34162-indonesian-volcano-panorama.html

 

On viewer was not bothered at all and suggested it adds athmosphere.

 

What I do not get with the WATE is the largish 'ghost-blob' around the small thingy.

[leicashot]

Someone please explain to me what flare is....cause if that is not flare I have no idea what it is, or what flare is.....

 

I thought flare was caused by the intrusion of sunlight causing reflection showing in the final exposure, which is exactly what I see here, regardless of it being caused by the filter or not. It is flare.....isn't it!?

[sreidvt]

No lens is free of flare and, as I discussed in my review of 24/25 mm lenses, the 24/2.8 is slightly more prone to flare than the Zeiss 25/2.8. It's a great lens, however.

 

The chances of seeing flare, reflections, etc. also increase when one is using filters. of course.

 

Cheers,

[Guest tummydoc]

My 24-ASPH flared alarmingly more with the Leica UV/IR filter than it had previously with none. I switched to a Heliopan UV-IR and the flare reduced significantly, almost to no-filter levels. I've found that to be the case with every lens, though the wide-angles are the worst offenders, and at first blush (and depending on whom you choose to believe rather than test for yourself) that would seem frustrating because those wide-angles are said to mandate the Leica filters in order to achieve the greatest benefit from the firmware correction of cyan corner drift. I've found that regardless of the filter manufacturer, the firmware correction is sometimes spot-on, sometimes too little, and sometimes too much, depending on the light source. Using the Heliopans hasn't presented any headache w.r.t. the firmware correction, which on many occasions I have to augment with Pano-Tools even with the Leica filter. The flare with Leica filters is a post-processing nightmare by comparison.

[lars_bergquist]

Someone please explain to me what flare is....cause if that is not flare I have no idea what it is, or what flare is.....

 

I thought flare was caused by the intrusion of sunlight causing reflection showing in the final exposure, which is exactly what I see here, regardless of it being caused by the filter or not. It is flare.....isn't it!?

 

See my previous explanation. Every undesirable light phenomenon is not "flare". Now, ultimately, flare too is caused by reflected light, but undirected reflected light which does not cause delimited bright areas. Flare spreads evenly across the entire picture.

—This should not be too difficult to understand. This is just as we do not subsume unsharpness due to camera movement, due to subject movement or due to bad focusing under "fuzziness" and assume that they all have the same cause.

 

The old man from the Age of Photography

[stunsworth]

Lars, what you are referring to is what's usually called veiling flare. I think 95%+ of photographers would describe the effect in the shot at the top of this thread as flare.

[Guest guy_mancuso]

I agree Steve i would classify it as flare from the sun on first glance . Use your left hand to block it and be done with it. It is internal reflections and all that but the root cause is the sun and looking into it. too me this is very normal with any lens and any system this will happen. Some may handle it better though

[tofsla]

Thank you everyone for reply. Just to be clear FILTER WAS NOT USED. So, its internal lens flare or lens reflection. I was based my view on Erwin Puts review, where he stated that lens doesn't have any flare. Oh so much for this.

[ho_co]

Lars makes a good distinction, but as Mark said, in English at least, the term 'flare' covers a multitude of sins--and this is one.

 

See van Walree's optical definition page (Photographic optics), where he says

Flare is the collective name for colored spots, ghost images or veils that impair the image.

 

Van Walree also offers descriptions and examples at Flare, where he refers to this type of problem as "aperture ghosting" and illustrates it with a worse example than this one.

 

--HC

[sean_reid]

Thank you everyone for reply. Just to be clear FILTER WAS NOT USED. So, its internal lens flare or lens reflection. I was based my view on Erwin Puts review, where he stated that lens doesn't have any flare. Oh so much for this.

 

Well, not all reviews agree with Puts' conclusions about a number of lenses - best to consider various sources. Again, any lens can show flare under certain conditions. Some just resist it better than others. In general, the current Zeiss ZM lenses have the best resistance to flare of any lenses I've tested although many Leica lenses also resist it quite well. The 24/2.8 Elmarit is a wonderful lens, though.

 

Cheers,

[luigi bertolotti]

Lars, I think you made a reasonable effort to define more straightly what is a flare effect and what is a phenomenon that I have always roughly referred to as "diaphragm ghost on the pic": that is not mumbo jumbo and not confusing; I admit that terminolgy can be always discussed (OOF="bokeh" ? ) but a civil debate is better to be maintained hereby.

[erl]

O.K. I have just deleted two earlier posts that could have flared up into uncivil behaviour. It could have been ignored, but I want to demonstrate that the Mods have recently agreed to toughen up on lack of civility and courtesy towards fellow forum members. Disagree all you like, that is healthy, but stay civil.

 

Nuff said.

 

Now all go out and show some flare in your photography style.

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Hallo,

Look here: Leica M

[Eoin]

I would agree that veiling flare is almost like a fog in the image as in the sample below, The sample shown by the OP is commonly referred to as lens flare. Lars, you have my support, you old man form the age of good forum etiquette

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